Re: Ammo-zilla

[dvdeug@x8b4e53cd. (David Starner)]

On Fri, 29 Oct 1999 02:19:10 GMT, Larry Kilgallen <kilgallen@eisner.decus.org> 
wrote:
>In article <7vadsp$8q61@news.cis.okstate.edu>, dvdeug@x8b4e53cd. 
>(David Starner) writes:
>
>> If garbage collection is not mandated, however, then it can't be relied on 
>> in Ada code that might run under systems that don't garbage collect - i.e. 
>> portable Ada code can't use it. Hence either you deallocate any memory 
>> yourself, or suffer garbage leaks while running under a non-garbage 
>> collecting system.
>
>Vendors are free to implement garbage collection and will do so
>to the extent that the market demands.
>
>They have done so, including the vendor of "free" compilers.

I said nothing about vendors. As long as there are otherwise-reasonable
Ada compilers that don't garbage collect, good Ada programs must assume
they're running on that system. 

I once pointed out that integer'base could be an infinite precision
integer type. (Robert Dewar said yes, but it wasn't something that
was going to get added to GNAT.) Let's say that it was added to GNAT.
Good portable Ada code still couldn't depend on having 70 digit+ 
integer types. GC is the same - as long as most systems don't support it,
(and I'm not familiar with any major ones that don't run on the JVM that 
do), you can't depend on it. And as long as you can't depend on it, GC's
main advantage - saving the programer trouble worring about memory - is
useless. 

As a side question: Ada 95's designers must have been familiar with Modula 3's
support of garbage collection while letting real time stuff keep track of
its own memory. What stopped them from adopting something like that for
Ada 95?

--
David Starner - dstarner98@aasaa.ofe.org